An educator's guide to sustainability with young learners

Reduce: Better Wrapping for Presents

What’s the best way to deal with waste? Not create waste at all! If you can avoid buying things you don’t need, you save money and avoid generating waste. Here’s a suggestion to practice at home and with your students…

This is the time of year when lots of people exchange gifts. Wrapping paper is quite pretty, but expensive and generates a lot of waste at the end of the day.

How does my family react? We have two simple strategies:

1. Unwrap carefully. This one is hard for little kids, but once you’re past the age of 8, everyone in my family unwraps carefully because we know that all leftover paper will go in a box in my grandmother’s attic to be reused for future presents. I don’t think we’ve bought a roll of wrapping paper in more than 15 years. (Full disclosure – I bought tissue paper this year, to put in reused gift bags.) Each year, we cut off any ripped edges and we use the paper again and again until it disintegrates. The ripped and crumbling bits all get recycled. It’s actually a fun game at my family’s holiday gatherings to try to remember who used which paper first!

If you don’t have a stockpile of paper yet, or you have little kids who will rip through it, try strategy #2:

2. Use the funny pages. If you still get the newspaper, the comics page makes for fun wrapping. I always love re-reading the comics before unwrapping my birthday present. The Sunday comics make for great wrapping, because they’re so colorful!

Next step: Practice these strategies with your students. Have student make a winter present for their parents (maybe a fancy snowflake or a cotton ball snowman) and then help them “wrap” it in newsprint.

And don’t get me wrong – I tend to use brand new wrapping paper for wedding gifts and other important presents; but inside my family we know, it’s the thought that counts, not the wrapping paper!

Like this:

Related

3 Responses

This past weekend, The Toronto Star newspaper printed an outside page that doubled as wrapping paper. It featured a colourful holiday graphic, and the back side was a grid to help make cutting easier. Although sponsored by a specific company, it was a neat idea to remind people about the benefits of using newspaper as wrapping paper. A few gifts under my tree are wrapped in that paper, and it sure makes me feel good!